Mixed Media

Words Like Snowflakes

By Lauren Newkirk Maynard

“Any form not ordinarily used for literature has a lot of potential, I think. And each form will have its particular merits ”

Shelley Jackson

Shelley
Jackson’s fiction, as she puts it, “straddles the
borders between literature, art and electronic media.” Her
innovative, often nonlinear storytelling inhabits both physical and
virtual worlds, from tattooed bodies of volunteers in
“SKIN,” an ongoing series, to her groundbreaking
hypertext novel “Patchwork Girl,” written in 1995 when
the Internet was still young.

Jackson’s latest project, “SNOW,” is built for
Buffalo. Over the winter, she created a short story written in the
snow, sharing individual words through separate, consecutive images
posted on Instagram (@snowshelleyjackson).

“It was suggested by the appearance of streets and
sidewalks on a snowy day: white with black marks, like a printed
page,” she says. As WBFO’s Visiting Professor in the
Arts for 2015-2016, Jackson came to campus twice last fall to give
a reading and expose English students to new ways of approaching
creative writing through art, science and other disciplines. She
returned in February to create and photograph more frosty words.

In a recent email exchange with At Buffalo, Jackson provided a
glimpse into a life immersed in the world of words.

What excites you most about digital forms of
literature?
I’ve been especially drawn to the way they emphasize patterns
of relationship over linear narrative, and how easily they
incorporate other media. Right now I am fascinated with the way
their shifty, contingent relationship with their “body”
(i.e., whatever device you’re reading on) underscores the
ghostliness of language, its tension with the material world to
which it’s ambiguously tethered.

What about social media—what is its potential in art and
literature?
Any form not ordinarily used for literature has a lot of potential,
I think. And each form will have its particular merits (e.g.,
Twitter’s haiku-like compression). But what feels newest to
me is the social in social media, and this has been important to my
work from the beginning. Every book depends on its readers, but in
“SKIN,” the readers are the work. The story has
actually become a social network, an invisible web of relationships
spanning the globe, intimate and distant at the same time.

Is there a particular attraction to doing a project via
Instagram?
I like the serial-release form, which feels appropriate to a
project that is (1) incredibly slow and (2) entirely subject to
weather conditions, so that the words come in flurries, like
snowflakes. I’m always conscious that certain early
writers—Dickens, famously—published their novels
serially, and it makes me laugh to think of this project as a weird
heir to that tradition.

What did you do with UB students, both in and out of the
classroom?
My role at UB was to provoke encounters between students in a
variety of different departments. For example, some writing
students and I visited Professor of Art Paul Vanouse’s Biological Art class,
where we prepared petri dishes for an expedition to a polluted
stream to take samples and talk about the different ways that a
writer and an artist might engage with the material properties of
the site.

Has your work, like “SNOW,” become more ephemeral
over time compared to the permanency of a tattoo?
Is a tattoo permanent? Bodies are not permanent. People are not
permanent. Hence the subtitle of my project, “a mortal work
of art.” We are just slower-melting snowflakes.